Thank you for your response.

I hope you can see that my comrade’s defensive stance is because of past experiances and not anything personal.

I wish my friends would try to remember the human more too, but I get why they can forget because of their experiences. I hope that makes sense.

It makes sense, but tbh victimizing random strangers isn’t a solution (I don’t feel like a victim, just putting it into words of how dangerous I think this can be). And I do hope you understand where I’m coming from, with the understanding this might be my very skewed view, it’s this that made me consider your community dangerous, especially for minority groups. It feels like weaponized anger, where dissenting thoughts are attacked intensively (as I’ve experienced here, and I for the most part agree with hexbear’s ideological/social stance even). I think that’s fine for your community, but it’s this why I had negative flashbacks to my early days when I stumbled upon places like 4chan. Trolling, flamming, “jokes”, until it wasn’t jokes anymore, then the real problematic elements took over. I truly do hope that what I’ve encountered is a skewed image that isn’t true.

It’s also very difficult to detach action from intent, I sadly can’t read people’s intent when they hurl insults my way, I can only see actions, what they write down. I don’t see past trauma and experiences, only their words they direct at me. Having dealt with people with deep seated trauma in my close friendgroup and beyond, I know those things take time and understanding to get through, and the anger you receive isn’t always intended, but unleashing anger at random internet forum members isn’t a great outlet (well it’s a great outlet for the person with the trauma, but not the receiving people, nobody deserves to be the punching bag to someone else’s trauma).

It’s also a hard ask for me to assume only the best intentions, when I keep being called the worst. But I do enjoy you have talked to me as a person, even when my OP was an unkind opener for this dialogue, I really appreciate it.

I had moved to the fediverse in the hopes of finding the earlier days of internet forums again, smaller communities with a good baseline of respect, where long form debate was more common, including differing opinions (to within reasons ofc, nobody likes a Nazi, and they were hated in the early days luckily), but I’ve not enjoyed that here. I’ve instead experienced hate worse than I have experienced on reddit, when trump was still the big problem, and the best quality responses you’d get from his fanatics is “cope harder” and some pepe images. A time where any debate was just sad responses of “oh you malding” etc… Where the perception of “winning” meant insulting the other person harder, lying about them and continuously moving to other topics.

Perhaps I’ll keep to social events in person, speakeasies etc… It seems social media has just soured permanently. Luckily I’m still part of several inclusive programming communities, that has been enough for now for me, and perhaps it’s better that way.

Thank you very much for your response, I wish you the bests.